I am very proud to continue our new feature: music reviews that are written by the senior contributing editor of Stereophile magazine- Michael Fremer. It has been a pleasure to speak with Michael and learn more about audio sound and equipment. In fact, his new DVD, "It's A Vinyl World, After All" has hit the shelves and is selling out very quickly. This is a must have for anybody who loves vinyl, it is a true masterpiece.

Additionally, make sure to stop by his site, www.musicangle.com and bookmark it for further exploration. I certainly want to thank Michael for the exclusive rights to reprint his fantastic material.

The Cars didn’t swing but that was the point. Rick Ocasek didn’t emote much, but that too was the point. The Cars were all about gleaming chrome, hard edges, not too glam-rock and taking Roxy Music to its logical, stripped down conclusion. The musical and cultural concept was modern yet retro. It was an American band, after all.

It was 1978 and The Cars helped usher in and would eventually be overtaken by the synth disco hair bands. Despite the trappings, The Cars were very conservative, from David Robinson’s tidy on-the-beat drumming to Greg Hawkes’ orderly synth lines. No raucous Eno squealing for him.

Even when allowed to predominate, on the final tune “All Mixed Up,” the synth parts are neat and punctual. Elliot Easton’s guitar lines were dazzlingly understated, serving to fill more than to puncture. Ric Ocasek’s vocals were cool and detached but hardly campy.

What made the debut click with the American public almost immediately were Ocasek’s songs: familiar enough and tuneful at their core but sufficiently alienated and alienating to effectively counterbalance the then dominant California culture.

Look at the pictures on the inner sleeve of the gatefold reissue and you see, despite the leopard skin tights, suspenders and the rest of the modestly hip get ups, more beantown working class earnestness than rock and roll outrageousness.

The album opens with “Good Times Roll,” a concept that usually produces musical and lyrical abandon but here, not so much. Over a stiff beat Ocasek makes it almost painful: “let them knock you around,” “let the stories be cold,” “let them make you a clown.” Sure, the idea is sort of roll with it but not comfortably or with abandon.

While “My Best Friend’s Girl” hints at a well-worn theme of longing and possessiveness, Ocasek flips it brilliantly at the end with “and she used to be mine.” The dismissive obsessiveness and cool cruelty of “Just What I Needed,” written by Ocasek but sung by bassist Benjamin Orr remains one of the great lyrical coups of modern rock. Combined with a brilliant opening, a tightly wound center and non-resolved ending, the tune’s demo version was much requested on WBCN-FM and helped signal the station’s paradigm shift from hippiedom to the “new wave” led by the program director Oedipus.

Over the decades, Ocasek’s spare, cool lyrics, filled with desire and ambivalence, only gleam brighter. There’s not a bad tune on this debut and the arrangements, though now familiar, are spare works that craftily whip rock guitar and new synth into candy gloss, carousel perfection. You could say some of it is too cute by half and accuse the beat of plodding now, but it did back then too. In fact, the deliberativeness of Robinson’s mechanical sounding rhythm tracks was and remains one of the album’s core strengths even as you will them to break free.

Recorded at AIR Studios in the UK and produced by Queen producer Roy Thomas Baker and originally mastered by George Marino at Sterling Sound, the album has always had a cool crunchiness that may have been intentional both to mirror the musical intent and to make it “pop” more on the radio but it never made for a great listen on a high performance audio system.

The original pressing has both a Sterling stamp on the lead out groove area and the initials “RTB” (scribed in the plastic), which probably means he was involved in the original cut. Clearly RTB wanted it cool and somewhat crunchy because the original Japanese pressing (Elektra Warner-Pioneer P-10552E) is more dynamic, more bass-intense and produces far more depth than does the original American issue.

Mo-Fi’s new gatefold edition sounds closer to the Japanese than to the original but it’s even better in most ways and as good in others. The Mo-fi is just crunchy enough, but not too crunchy and has excellent bottom end extension and definition. It also produces more depth and width than does the original and it doesn’t push the vocal harmonies up against a glass wall, which is something the others do.

If this is one of your ‘go to’ albums, go to your favorite records store, virtual or brick and mortar, and get this. It’s just what you’re needing.

Both Davy Jones and Mickey Dolenz were child actors before landing a gig with the Monkees. Neither cared much about the music, they cared more about close-ups. Dolenz slipped the cameraman $25 to make sure he got the most close-ups. That didn’t fair too well, especially when Jones would slip the guy $35 and steal the show.

The drummer who played on the Marvelettes 1961, number one hit, "Please Mr. Postman" was 22 year old Marvin Gaye.

When RCA released 55 albums in stereo in May of 1958, executives at other record companies declared stereo a passing fad and predicted that mono would always be around.

The drum sound on Buddy Knox's 1957 hit, "Party Doll" was actually made by a cardboard box filled with cotton.

After Prince converted to being a Jehovah's Witness in May of 2001, fans could count at least 50 songs the artist can no longer perform due to their explicit content, including hits such as "Little Red Corvette" and "Cream.”

One day Michael Jackson decided to entertain himself. So he sat on the floor of his living room tearing up $100 bills; throwing them into the air saying, “Isn’t it pretty. Money makes the best confetti.” Uh, I wouldn’t know, gloved one.

Ernie K-Doe found a tune called "Mother-In-Law" in songwriter Allen Toussaint's discarded song pile and immediately wanted to record it, as he was having marital problems and blamed his wife's mother for much of them. The result was a surprising number one hit in May of 1961.

The first pressings of John Sebastian's May, 1976 solo hit, "Welcome Back", were entitled "Welcome Back Kotter" to make sure that the public identified the record as the theme song to the TV show of the same name.

When Elvis Presley married his longtime girlfriend, Priscilla Beaulieu on May 1, 1967, they danced to the Elvis song she heard when they met in 1959, "Love Me Tender.”

Keyboard player Billy Preston is the only studio musician to ever get credit on a Beatles' record.

The only artist in rock and roll history to record Billboard's number one single of the year for two years in a row was Elvis Presley, with "Heartbreak Hotel" in 1956 and "All Shook Up" in 1957. Both records held the top spot for 25 weeks in those years.

Stephen Stills of CSN fame actually auditioned to be one of the Monkees. But the producers didn’t hire him because his hair was falling out and he had bad teeth. So Stills suggested to his friend, Peter Tork, to go in for a tryout. Tork walked into the wall as he entered the audition and the job was his.

Lawrence Welk is the only US recording artist to have more appearances on network television than Paul Revere and The Raiders.

Gene Pitney started his music career in the early 1960s as a song writer, penning Rick Nelson's "Hello Mary Lou,” Bobby Vee's "Rubber Ball" and the Crystals' "He's a Rebel.”

Following last year’s superb expanded reissue of Superfuzz Bigmuff, Sub Pop Records is releasing remastered editions of that classic proto-grunge EP and the first two Mudhoney albums on colored vinyl today.

Due out Sept. 22 and remastered from the original tapes, 1988’s Superfuzz Bigmuff will be on grey/off-black vinyl, 1989’s Mudhoney will be on magenta/”purple-y” vinyl and 1991’s Every Good Boy Deserves Fudge will be on “salmon-y”/orange vinyl, according to the label — which notes “some of these records haven’t been available on vinyl for ages/a couple of years.” Each also comes with a download code.

On the heels of a new EP and recent North American tour, Austin group The Octopus Project are returning to the studio to record their next full-length. To tide fans over in the meantime, the band's first two albums have been reissued on vinyl and are available in stores now. The band's haunting debut, Identification Parade, was originally issued by Peek-A-Boo Records in 2002, and deftly combines the experimentation of progressive post-rock, the blips and bleeps of electronic music and the raw, human ROCK of rock. Recorded and assembled over several years while the band was still mostly a recording project, Identification Parade is far more etherial, hypnotic and atmospheric than subsequent albums, and has been best described as "ambidextrous equipment failure junk-tronica."

Several years and many tours later, the 2005 sophomore album, "One Ten Hundred Thousand Million", captured the barely-controlled chaos of The Octopus Project's live performances in a rich, surround sound, 3-D, technicolor studio amalgamation injected with the wild energy they felt in noisy, tightly-packed clubs. It was this album that caught the attention of Rolling Stone Senior Editor David Fricke, who described the band's sound as "an outtake of the Beach Boys' 'Good Vibrations' with Mogwai as the studio band" and "tightly composed bundles of synthesized whoop and circus-calliope cheer... like Stereolab with happy feet."

"Identification Parade" has never appeared on vinyl until now. "One Ten Hundred Thousand Million" was originally released on vinyl in a very limited edition of 500 copies with alternate hand-screened cover artwork. Peek-A-Boo Records is very excited to finally make both of these stellar albums available for vinyl enthusiasts.

Jimi Hendrix's sister has stated that there is still "another decade" of unreleased music and video to come from the guitarist.

Janie Hendrix, also president and CEO of Experience Hendrix and Authentic Hendrix (the companies that deal with his legacy), revealed that she wants to release new material every 12 to 18 months for the next ten years.

"We probably have another decade of music, including video. Every 12 to 18 months we'll continue to have new releases and Dagger [Experience Hendrix's label for live recordings] official bootlegs," she told Gibson.

"Jimi was a workaholic. After Electric Lady studios was built he was able to record constantly for as many hours as he wanted to. It's almost as if he knew he had only four years to accomplish everything that he did. We have an amazing amount of original masters, including a lot of material that hasn't been previously released."

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Pianist Ferrante Dies

Pianist and composer Arthur Ferrante passed away on early Saturday from natural causes at the age of 88. He and Lou Teicher recorded for 40 years as Ferrante and Teicher, releasing 150 albums, receiving 22 gold and platinum awards.

While their style could best be characterized as Easy Listening or "Beautiful Music" they nonetheless reached the Billboard top 10 four times in their career with the Theme From The Apartment (1960/#10 Pop/#24 R&B), Theme From Exodus (1961/#2 Pop/#6 R&B), Tonight (1961/#8 Pop/#2 Adult Contemporary) and Midnight Cowboy (1970/#10 Pop/#2 Adult Contemporary). 31 of their albums made the Top 200 between 1962 and 1972.

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Emerson, Lake & Palmer May Reform Next Year

There may be a chance that Emerson, Lake and Palmer will reunite next year for their first tour in over a decade. Carl Palmer told the Birmingham (U.K.) Post:

“We were going to reform ELP this year but we had a few medical problems involving Keith.

“One of his hands needs looking at so we had to postpone it. It’s an occupational hazard, with both of my hands having been operated on, but hopefully we can make it happen next year. Our second reformation was from 1991 to 1998 so I suppose we are due another one.”

Sanctuary/UMC will be releasing deluxe remastered editions of two of their albums, Works Volume 1 & 2 (together in one set for the first time) and Welcome Back My Friends To The Show That Never Ends… Ladies & Gentlemen, Emerson, Lake & Palmer. Both are set for release on November 10.

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Foo Fighters 'Greatest Hits' Tracklisting Unveiled Including two new songs...

Foo Fighters have revealed the songs on their forthcoming singles collection 'Greatest Hits'.

The sixteen tracks on the album span the bands whole career including 'Big Me' from their self titled first album right up to the specially recorded new material. Two new tracks,'Wheels' and 'Word Forward', will be included on the album.

A deluxe edition of 'Greatest Hits' will be released that will come with a 28 page book of exclusive photograph's plus a DVD including highlights of the bands shows at Wembley Stadium and Hyde Park in London.

'Greatest Hits' tracklisting,

'All My Life''Best Of You''Everlong''The Pretender''My Hero''Learn To Fly''Times Like These''Monkey Wrench''Big Me''Breakout''Long Road To Ruin''This is a Call''Skin and Bones''Wheels''Word Forward''Everlong' (acoustic)

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Theory Of A Deadman Announce Special Edition

SCARS & SOUVENIRS SPECIAL EDITION RELEASE

Vancouver’s latest breakthrough rock band Theory of A Deadman will be releasing a special edition of their RIAA Gold Certified album Scars & Souvenirs on October 20th on Roadrunner Records. The album, which has produced numerous hits and propelled the band to new heights, was originally released in April 2008. The special edition will include eight bonus tracks, as well as a bonus DVD with 10 videos, which span the band’s entire career, as well an EPK which features exclusive behind-the-scenes footage, and a hilarious vignette that spoofs MTV’s Cribs, entitled “Haciendas: Tyler’s Place.”

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Paper + Plastick Release Frank Turner's First Three Years Double LP

Paper + Plastick Records have announced the release of UK anti-folk troubadour Frank Turner's collection of demos, B-sides, live tracks and covers, collectively known as The First Three Years. The vinyl label, which normally includes a digital download of each album, will be releasing this double LP exclusively on wax, which fans can purchase at www.paperandplastick.com.

"Frank Turner is the future of British music," says P+P founder Vinnie Fiorello, "And I don't say that lightly. He channels Billy Bragg like he has Billy's blood running through his own veins. The lyrics, the melodies, and the way he connects with the crowd makes him a contender to be the ONLY British import that matters. I'm honored to be able to release his early songs all packaged up in a fantastic looking double LP. Long Live Frank Turner!"

Turner's solo career took off overseas after his London-based hardcore band Million Dead broke up in 2005. He recorded these 23 songs between 2005 and 2008, of which most were demos and B-sides that appeared on split releases or compilations in the UK, but are all available for the first time this side of the pond on The First Three Years. A nod to a Black Flag album in both name and artwork, Three Years... also features Turner's folky and haunting interpretations of songs from Black Flag and Bad Brains to The Lemonheads, The Postal Service and ABBA. Having released a new album earlier this month, Poetry Of The Deed, this collection comes just in time for fans to catch up on Turner's earlier work and sing along while he is out on the road this fall currently supporting The Gaslight Anthem.

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Chord & Fawn Debut LP

The Chord and the Fawn have announced that they will release their debut full-length album on December 1st. The band have taken their ukulele and other musical trinkets to Flowers Studio (The Jayhawks, The Replacements, Mark Mallman, Motion City Soundtrack) in Minneapolis where they are working on their debut full length titled "M-I-S-S-I-S-S-I-P-P-I." With engineer Peter Anderson and producer Tom Rehbein, the production is sure to match the talent of this young duo and generate a huge buzz in the Twin Cities.

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Eyehategod Vinyl Release

New Orleans' Eyehategod have spent the last two decades at odds with a corrupt music industry, using their music as a proverbial middle finger aimed at everything from government officials to sanctimonious shitheads hiding behind organized religion. "Confederacy Of Ruined Lives" is their fourth studio album, released in late 2000. Vinyl-only imprint I'm Better Than Everyone Records is collaborating with Eyehategod on its vinyl release. This extremely special release will be available to the masses on Tuesday, October 22nd and will be available in two versions: The main edition will behand numbered and limited to 400 on thick black vinyl. There will also be an extremely limited edition of 100 hand numbered copies on white vinyl with tan and black splatter. Both editions will be encased in a deluxe triple gatefold!